Friday, September 22, 2017

Dinesh Kamath's Editorial 'Our economy badly needs a boost' that was published in Newsband

Our economy badly needs a boost
The Centre needs to improve the economy considerably and keep inflationary risks well under control. The current fiscal year growth is expected to be around 7 per cent. The slowdown is a result of the shock caused by demonetisation. Growth is expected to be impacted by the implementation of GST.  
Both demonetisation and the GST implementation were disruptive moves. The Government needs to relieve the pain caused by them. Businesses continue to remain slow. Inflationary pressures are returning. Petroleum product prices too are also affecting the price index. Exports have not been doing too well. Bank credit growth to industry has also been poor.
Consumer and investor sentiments will improve if the Government effects some feel-good policies like lowering taxes on petroleum products addressing the problems of farmers

It is clear that the government is in the 2019 mode (which it always was) and therefore economics be damned. In spite of good monsoon and nearing festive season the demand is not coming up both in urban and rural areas .Even markets with niches like automobiles moves slow thanks to the neck breaking demonetisation effect which suppressed both supply and demand side and GST currently reduced business doing optimism though it creates tax hurdle free national market. Oil prices are slowly rising and current account deficit is also on hike. Snail paced job creation and severe blow to IT sector jobs are on card. Export is not promising when there is a dearth of working capital caused by delay in refund of tax input credit. Instead of thinking about the bullet train luxury let us concentrate on agriculture and industries with ease of doing business.

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